“A Bird in Bishopswood” by John Tickhill

“A Bird in Bishopswood” is an immersive springtime lyric scribbled on the back of a rental account for St. Paul’s Cathedral dated to circa 1395. Based on Ruth Kennedy’s careful comparison of the handwriting, scholars surmise that the author of the poem is John Tickhill, who served as Collector of Rents at St. Paul’s at the time when the rental account was created. The rent documents are written primarily in Latin, the administrative language of medieval Europe, unlike the poem, which is in the vernacular Middle English. For an alliterative poem of only forty-one lines, “A Bird in Bishopswood” conveys extraordinary poignancy using concentric contrasts to describe a mundane encounter with nature that provided solace from the speaker’s humdrum routine.

The poem describes a man who strolls out northeast from London to what is now Bethnal Green, spies a beautiful bird who has settled on a nearby bough, and fantasizes about capturing it as he retreats for fear of scaring the bird away. The scene is a May morning. While the conventions of the medieval chanson d’aventure, or adventure narrative, dictate that spring is a time for communion with nature, good cheer, songs, and lovemaking—May is a “merry month”—the I of the poem is trapped in a Lenten mood. He is dissatisfied with his mode of life, joyless, without the means to frolic (“unpurveyed of play”), and flat-out exhausted (“wery”). The opening of the poem acknowledges the cheerfulness of the season, much like the famous opening of the “General Prologue” to Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, only to pull up short:

            I myself had lingered in my Lenten season

grieving my life

 

(“And I had lenyd me long al a Lentyn tyme

In vnlust of my lyf”)

The speaker describes the bird in terms more appropriate for a woman at court: she is the “fairest” he has seen, perfect in every limb, pensive, lovelorn (“she missed a mate [make]”). The bird’s pronouns oscillate between she and it as the man revolves her image in his mind. The bird is flighty, with its full complement of feathers, whereas the man is sluggish (“unlight”) and has not brought birdlime (a sticky substance used to trap birds) with him. There is not much drama in this hunt conducted by a fowler who’s unskilled and unprepared.

Set within these contrasts is similarity. Coming upon the bird, even without capturing her, fulfills the expectations associated with the season and faintly echoes the thrill of the chase in hunting scenes in romances. The bird’s pensive demeanor reflects the man’s mood back to him and distinguishes both of them from their fellow creatures (“as other people [wyes] did,” “as other fowls did”). They are a perfect match—except in the one, obvious way. At the center of the poem, man and female bird share a moment of grief-stricken silence as each yearns for the mate that the other cannot ever physically be. Disturbingly, the man’s fantasy about the bird ultimately involves not the mutual care idealized in the discourse of courtly love, but incarceration (“For to keep in my cage”). The poem grasps the potential for violence under the surface of emotional connections, again intimating a surprising turn away from what a reader might expect from a romantic springtime poem.

The final lines offer one last contrast, this one seasonal. Amid this May tableau, the man imagines caging the bird through the winter, when it will grow tired of the cold weather and look forward to a new spring. The closing words of the poem (“and would abide summer”) loop back to its opening words (“In a season of summer”), which suggests the cyclical nature of emotional life and the possibility of renewal for both man and bird. Other Middle English alliterative poems with circular endings include Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Awntyrs off Arthure.

As all the l sounds in the passage above suggest, “A Bird in Bishopswood” is an alliterative poem. Rather than end rhyme or syllable-counting, the poem uses the bipartite long line found in Gawain, William Langland’s Piers Plowman, and many other poems, as discussed in the Alliterative Verse collection. The two halves of the line are linked by alliterating sounds. The structure of this now-obsolete verse form, which counts neither syllables nor stresses, is complex and a little mysterious. Modern scholars have pieced together its organizing principles through induction, for no fourteenth-century treatise or ars poetica describing them has been found.

While the best-known alliterative poems are lengthy narrative compositions, Tickhill boils down this form into a bite-sized lyric. In short space, “A Bird in Bishopswood” expresses a redoubled consciousness: wondrous expansion and leisure outside the bustling city are cut into by an oppressive awareness of unfulfilled desire. The profession of the poem’s speaker is never stated, but his journey from London to Bishop’s Wood carries with it a sense of escaping the work-a-day city for a putatively refreshing encounter with the green world. If not a Collector of Rents precisely, the I of the poem seems to have a worldly job that affords leisure time, thus distinguishing him from a cloistered monk, an unfree peasant, or an earl. It’s hard not to associate this poem’s speaker with John Tickhill, Collector of Rents, who might have benefited from a stroll outdoors.

The double and concentric nature of the poem’s vision of leisure and desire is mirrored by the circumstances of its survival. The poem’s production on the reverse of a cathedral rental account suggestively juxtaposes sublimity and the everyday. Like some other late-fourteenth-century English alliterative compositions, such as Piers Plowman (which our poet may well have read: the poems share the exact same opening verse), Tickhill’s poem travels the circuit between paying rent and creating art.

It is relatively uncommon to know the name of the author of a fourteenth-century English poem, especially one in unrhymed alliterative verse. We are fortunate that the paper trail of Tickhill’s bureaucratic activities enables a positive identification. How wonderful that such a poem came down to us at all. After having been copied onto the rental roll and stored with other financial documents of St. Paul’s, “A Bird in Bishopswood” had to wait centuries to come to the attention of literary scholars. It was only in 1980 that a sharp-eyed archivist flagged the text for further study. The poem and its mode of survival both attest to the everyday desire for connection, then and now.